Australia’s nbn launches HFC services

Australian’s National Broadband Network (nbn) has launched its first commercial HFC services on the former Telstra HFC network in Ocean Reef, Western Australia.

The Telstra HFC network will form the vast majority of the new nbn HFC network and end-users can order services from Retail Service Providers of up to 100/40Mbps.

Optus, TPG and Exetel are offering HFC services at launch. By June 2017 nbn plans to have nearly 900,000 HFC premises RFS across Australia.

John Simon, Chief Customer Officer at nbn, said: “It has taken a huge effort by all of our team at nbn to get us to this point, a massive amount of work has been done with Telstra, our delivery partners, our technology vendors and our customers to be able to get here. It is worth remembering that we will actually be one of the first operators in the world to deliver open access wholesale services over an HFC network so we have broken a lot of new ground in these last couple of years and now that hard work will pay off for our customers and end-users. There has been huge debate about the various technologies that we are using to build the nbn but with the recent very exciting developments around new technologies like DOCSIS 3.1 and the Gigabit speeds it will bring people have begun to understand what a fantastic asset HFC networks will be for Australia.”